With the term “industrial plant”, any large-scale industrial installation is meant which can for example belong to one of the industrial fields of power generation and transmission, water desalination and distribution, manufacturing of industrial and consumer products or processing of metals, pulp and paper, minerals or oil and gas. In the following, simply the term “plant” is used to cover all of these installations.
During the whole life cycle of such a plant, different types of computer-implemented tools are used which individually support the related personnel in connection with different stages of the life of the plant, such as planning, installation, implementation, configuration, operation, maintenance or servicing of the technical equipment in the plant. Further, separate tools can be required when dealing with different technical aspects of the plant, for example a distributed control system versus an electrical power supply installation versus a monitoring and surveillance system.
Each of the different tools can provide a graphical user interface (GUI) which allows for the visualization of the technical equipment of the plant. The GUIs commonly provide functionality to design or configure or monitor, respectively, the technical equipment, depending on the specific purpose of the tool.
During the last few years, a trend towards an integration of these tools behind one and the same GUI can be observed, as is for example described in the brochure “System 800xA for Power Generation: Integrated automation for the power industry”, by ABB Ltd, 2009, Document ID—9AKK104295D3513, which is available online.
The current focus of this trend towards tool integration, which is reflected in this brochure, lies on the functional aspects, e.g., to generate synergy effects with respect to faster project execution, easier handling of plant data and reduction of costs.
With respect to the visualization of the data generated, modified and used by the integrated tools, it is mentioned in the brochure that a single window environment is used to represent different kinds of data. However, from the brochure it becomes clear that still each tool gets its own visual representation in the single window, which means that for the above named different stages and technical aspects related to each tool, different parts of the technical equipment of the plant become visible.